The Australian Research Council to fund 17 elite researchers

The fellowships provide a five-year salary supplement on top of Level E pay from their institution, plus two postdocs for five years, two postgrads for four and a $300 000 per annum project funding.

This year’s fellows are:

ANU: Rupert Grafton (Indigenous Australians relationship with water). Barry Pogson (synthetic biology to create higher-yield resilient plants)

James Cook U: David Bellwood (ecosystems of coral reefs)

Monash U: John Grundy (human-centric software).  Lynette Russell (database of Indigenous Australians contact with sea-farers).

RMIT: Yi-Min (Mike) Xie (computational process for manufacturing)

Uni Melbourne: Nina Wedell (insecticide resistance in flies)

UNSW: Kaarin Anstey (cognitive ageing). Liming Dai (carbon-based catalysis processes for renewable energy). Andrew Dzurak (commercial-ready quantum computer processor).

Uni Queensland: Debra Bernhardt (molecular simulation models and clean energy). Sara Dolnicar (predictive theory of pro-environment behaviour in leisure/tourism). Lianzhou Wang (creating fuel and chemicals from water and carbon dioxide)

Uni Sydney: Marcela Bilek (porous and dispersed materials in biomedicine).

UWA:  Enrico Valdinoci (mathematical analysis)

UTS: Jie Lu (big data and machine learning)

Western Sydney U: Belinda Medlyn (predictive model, Australian vegetation dynamics)